Everyone is now aware of the so-called "cancel culture" which claims that history must be rewritten to suit the narrative of "the present." There is no doubt that this is sheer madness, and for various reasons.
First, history, at least in its intentions, is a reconstruction of “what really was” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”), as the influential German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) said.
Apart from the dreams of some historians, we know that we may never know what happened, as we have only fragments and pieces are always missing, but we can at least give a plausible outline of the historical course.
We undertake a journey into a past which may be distorted by the preconceptions of our present. Therefore, we must always be careful about the perspective we adopt in our research, or at least acknowledge this perspective.
Cancel culture eliminates this problem by reading all history according to an ideology of a “present" which they make up with "gender studies," feminism, …More